

Some have soda and some others have bitters-minor tweaks, perhaps-but then some have three full ounces of pineapple juice and many have none at all. There’s definitely cherry involved, but whether it’s the sweet red liqueur or the punchy clear distillate is contested.

says neither, while Trader Vic, just to be annoying, says both). Almost everyone also agrees that it has citrus, so there’s that too, so long as you don’t mind that half say lemon and the other half say lime (Charles Baker Jr. Let’s start with what we know: Everyone seems to agree it’s a gin drink, so we have that going for us. Some cocktails have a history so contested, so laden with switchbacks and apocrypha, the general experience is like opening a compass to find the needle spinning freely in place.


Historically, gin slings - the most popular kind - are made with gin, a lump of sugar, and a few gratings of nutmeg.
#SINGAPORE SLING INGREDIENTS HOW TO#
Here is our take on how to craft the best modern interpretation of the Singapore Sling. While some of the details are a bit blurry - and some may be lost to history - the modern manifestation of the cocktail is one worth contemplating. That said, the Raffles has since popularized the cocktail, taking pride in its relative fashionability, and stating on its website that “the Singapore Sling is widely regarded as the national drink of the country,” although their version now includes pineapple juice, grenadine, dry curaçao, and a couple other additions that stray from the suspected classic formula. According to his panel discussion at Tales of the Cocktail in 2017, The Raffles Hotel in Singapore needed to up their business so they “found” the inventor’s recipe in a safe. Singapore’s Raffles Hotel claims to have invented the drink in 1915, but Wondrich also disproved that assertion pointing out that the earliest mention of a sling-style cocktail was in 1897, and that in 1903 “pink slings for pale people,” was a quote he stumbled on while conducting his research on the subject. Gin, a cherry brandy ( kirschwasser style), Bénédictine, lime juice, and a few dashes of bitters seem to be the constants based on a mention of this particular formula in the Singapore Weekly Sun in 1915. For starters, the cocktail isn’t even a sling.Īccording to renowned cocktail historian David Wondrich - who has done the work of the cocktail gods by sifting through various texts and archives to unravel when and where the cocktail originated, and what was originally in it - there are a few ingredients that are a part of the recipe for certain. The Singapore Sling, however, might be the most convoluted of all because of the myriad of ingredients it contains, but there are a few things that have been uncovered thus far. Many classic cocktails have an uncertain history due to a lack of record-keeping, or a long game of telephone where one name, or ingredient, was inaccurately transformed into another over the course of time.
